Toni Morrison

"Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." Her new novel has the same power, the same beauty. At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black,...

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop....

""The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister""-- Provided by publisher. Frank is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. He is shocked out of his apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and taker her back to the small Georgia town them come from and that he's hated all...

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child���the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment���weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her...

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer...

In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.

America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...

Generation after generation, classic fables, folklore, and myth remain popular because they quicken the imagination of listeners of all ages. We, the creators of Who's Got Game?, were inspired by the wonder of Aaesop's fables -- their vitality, their endless demand for new interpretations. In our versions the original stories are opened up and their moralistic endings re-imagined: the victim might not lose; the timid get a chance to become strong;...

Who IS the foreigner? Am I the foreigner in my own home? Who decides? Such were the questions posed by renowned author Toni Morrison at her 2006 guest-curated exhibit at the Louvre, "The Foreigner's Home". There she invited several renowned artists whose work also dealt with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public discussion that Morrison herself had been pursuing through her own research and writing. This film...

"In the works for sixteen years, The Complete Works of Primo Levi is the most ambitious literary translation of the twenty-first century. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that "quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest's astute intelligence," has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man, his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi's...